


the waking moments

by themorninglark



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam going to college, Long Distance Relationship, M/M, Post-Canon, The Barns, post-trk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-10
Updated: 2016-05-10
Packaged: 2018-06-07 12:44:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6805063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/pseuds/themorninglark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>The rules of separation were few and unspoken, but inviolate. Ronan kept them - not secret, for there were no more secrets in his life, not after his nights of truth -</p>
  <p>He kept them safe, safe as life and the Devil.</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	the waking moments

**Author's Note:**

> I've been simmering to write some post-canon Adam/Ronan since finishing TRK, and this poured forth in one sudden sitting, like a torrent. Maybe there'll be more where it came from, sometime.  
> Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

On the day that he left for college, Adam refused a ride.

Ronan, one hand resting, burning up on the bonnet of his BMW, did not push it; he sat back, let the metal and heat sear itself into his palm and his fingertips, prick at his half-chewed leather wristbands. Once, Kavinsky had made him a perfect replica of them, and Adam had found them in some forgotten corner of his bedroom, lying under another dream shaped like a blanket.

Ronan had offered him the lot. _We can match,_ he said, smirking. _That's what couples do, right?_

 _Ha,_ Adam had said, droll and amused, and looking like Ronan Lynch was the last person on earth he'd want to match. In the tilt of his chin, the firefly light caught his cheekbones, the curve and hollow that his neck made as it dipped into chiselled scapulae, pristine, unmarked, and Ronan felt his tattoo smoulder, those slow, steady hooks winding round his back and into Adam's skin. He could drown in those shadows of his.

He drank them in now, watching as Adam loaded his earthly possessions into the back of his shitbox.

Ronan did not say _I wish you'd let me drive you._

Instead, he produced a tape from his front pocket, held it between two fingers and brought it to his lips. A benediction, for the road.

"Parrish," he said.

Adam turned.

"Catch."

With a flick of his wrist, Ronan sent the tape hurtling through the air.

Adam reached, scrambled; his sneakers were dirty from trips into the wood, and they left scuff marks now in the gravel driveway, and the Barns, too, left their mark on him, dust settling round his ankles as he made the catch two-handed and said, " _Ronan_."

"So you don't miss me too much," said Ronan.

"As _if_ I'd miss you," Adam retorted.

But he was smiling, then, and so was Ronan, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he'd stuffed at least three remixes of the _Murder Squash Song_ into that tape.

Ronan lifted his warm palm from the BMW's bonnet. He held it out.

Adam slid the tape into his pocket and stepped closer.

Their fingers laced together, imperfectly, at first, then _perfectly_ for their desperation and their tightness and the way Adam's jutting knuckles dug ridges into the back of Ronan's hand, and Ronan let them, let Adam claim him like _this_ , his other hand ghosting up his knee, his thigh, their foreheads and noses and cheeks pressed together, and then Adam closed his eyes and Ronan felt the flutter of lashes against his shaved temple.

There would be no time for missing, for they were bigger than this.

Ronan knew they were bigger than everything.

And they were _more_. More than college and Henrietta and the caprices of time passing, looping in on itself; it swallowed its own tail like an Ouroboros and still they remained, standing separate and untouchable. They were an infinity of moments that studded themselves, _urgent_ , like stars and a bruising sunrise into the knife-sharp edge of tomorrow. They were a past entwined by bloody deeds and a future that sang. Tree-song. Wind rustling through sycamores, calling, calling. They were _now_.

When they _shifted_ with the light, Adam's teeth grazing Ronan's bottom lip, Ronan sucked in his breath. He murmured, voice rich and thick in Adam's mouth. "Behave, Parrish. Children are watching."

"Please," said Adam. "Opal's probably seen all your dreams about me."

Ronan grinned.

 

* * *

 

The rules of separation were few and unspoken, but inviolate. Ronan kept them - not secret, for there were no more secrets in his life, not after his nights of truth -

He kept them safe, safe as life and the Devil.

The first was: he had to answer his phone, which might as well _be_ the Devil.

After moving out of St. Agnes, freed from the burdensome accounting of rent to the church, Adam had not, to Ronan's pleasant surprise, tried to pull some prideful stunt cloaked in _parity_ on him; they both knew it would have ended in a fight. It wasn't even like the Barns needed money for upkeep.

Adam had not offered Ronan rent.

Instead, with the money he'd saved, he had gone out and bought a cell phone. It did two things: call and text. It was a secondhand model from a decade ago that looked like something out of Dollar City. Even _Ronan's_ phone, which had never been upgraded, was capable of taking pictures.

Had Gansey been here to witness this marvel, Ronan thought, he would have been aghast, then _fascinated_ , that such phones still existed for the buying. It would have appealed to the historian in him. To Ronan, it just looked like an old piece of shit.

All in all, he approved wholeheartedly.

He had been with the cows, inside, sticky with the scent of hay and sweat and summer afternoons when Adam sent him the first text of his life. _Hey,_ it said. _It's me. I got a phone._

Ronan was no fool. Adam did not have to spell out his reasons.

_Typing hurts my thumb. I don't know how Gansey does it so easy._

Ronan tapped out his answer one-handed, absently stroking a calf between its ears. _it hurts ur thumb bcuz ur thumb sticks out weird_

The sun had moved an entire degree across the sky before Adam replied.

_You know a lot about my thumb._

_duh._

 

* * *

 

He had learned the first rule, and this was the second:

Now that he _had_ , had touched, had lived and tasted and laid his hungry, roving hands on his dream awake, had opened his eyes and seen, still, that Adam was there beside him, that his fingers were on his mouth and his smile was real, there was no more dreaming for Ronan.

He did not know if _he_ had made this rule, or if Cabeswater had laid it down to rest along with everything else. He had slept the long, uninterrupted sleep of the dreamless for three nights after Gansey died, and lived. He had woken up unnerved, strangely _lonely_ at first with his empty mind and empty hands, and then he had tossed and turned in bed and there was Adam's breath on his cheek, and he had calmed down.

When the dreams returned, they whispered a gentler tune. A music-box tune, tinkling like windchimes and ivories, plucking a different string in Ronan's heart.

Adam was no longer in them.

Ronan's eyes flew open.

Adam was _there_.

In the flesh, he slept, and in the morning light, Ronan allowed himself a long, slow look, to etch this sight into his memory like a second tattoo, one for him and him alone to see.

And when Adam left, Ronan wondered if, miles away, he would show up again, sharp and immediate and all too believable in his dreams like he used to, smelling of gasoline, sometimes of hand cream. Sweet and tangy and sexy all wrapped in one impossible man.

But he never did, and Ronan found that he was okay with that, after all.

 

* * *

 

 _Tell me a story,_ Adam had said once.

They were on the roof, and Ronan's legs were stretched out before him as he leaned back on his elbows, surveying his realm. His kingdom of little miracles. Across the field, tiny, luminescent pinpricks danced; he did not know if they were fireflies or flowers, swaying in the wind. The night was cool on his neck. There was nothing between him and the sky, and he was electric. He was vibrant with possibilities.

 _Why?_ Ronan asked, and Adam, a little unsteady on his feet, sat down. Unlike Ronan, he had not spent a childhood climbing roofs.

Ronan was determined to make up for lost time. He would show Adam the view from the top of the world.

_You said your father used to tell you stories._

_Yeah,_ said Ronan. _He did._

_I think I'd like to hear one._

It had been an innocent enough request, and Ronan knew Adam, the layers of him and all of his tight-lipped closures, to know that this was an opening, a tentative invitation to the intimacies of past lives. Adam had not known love like Ronan had. Little by little, unfolding, he was becoming ready for it, had become ready, somewhere in between their kisses.

Ronan let out a breath, explosive and drawn-out all at once.

 _I can't,_ he said, and it was the truth, because he did not lie, and he was not Declan, nor Niall. He was no storyteller.

He did not lie.

He said, _you already know all my stories._

 

* * *

 

There was no _third rule_ , because magical things came in _threes_ and Ronan was done as fuck with magical things.

They were ordinary, now. Two boys, born and bred from this land, and all that pulsed below; they were, respectively, dreamer and warden of a faded country, magician of his own life, inscribed in human boundaries. Nothing more or less.

They were powerful. They could do anything.

They were _two_ , Ronan and Adam, and they were _four_ , Ronan and Adam and Chainsaw and Opal, and here on their straddling perimeter, on either side of magic, Ronan was satisfied.

 

* * *

 

On the day that he went up to visit, Ronan accepted a favour.

He had not asked for it. It had been offered, in the guise of its opposite: a favour asked. _I'm travelling this weekend,_ read Declan's text. _Can Matthew come and stay at the Barns?_

Ronan's reply was not as terse as it could have been. _yeah. good timing. opal needs someone while i'm away._

 _Good,_ said Declan.

They did not thank each other. There was no need to.

It was just what Lynch brothers did.

So Matthew arrived, and with him, the sun; Opal lit up and hugged his leg when he tumbled out of Declan's car, and Ronan stood aside, watched as his dreams collided and peeled apart, none the worse for wear. _Happy,_ even.

He climbed into his BMW, waved to all of them and sped out of the driveway with an obnoxious roar and a cloud of dust in his wake.

He was leaving one home, and going to another.

 _Home, home, home,_ sang in his bones, and Ronan, hands tightening their grip on the wheel, turned up the volume on his electronic music and rolled down the window.

Chainsaw made an awful sound to match. Ronan let her, for it was a lot like the sound that he longed to make right now, himself, the sound that thumped in his chest, louder than triumph and closer than fingernails, an impossible sound that veined its way up through his heart, and he nearly burst with the fullness of it.

He floored the accelerator.

The freeway beckoned, and miles and miles of driving, and at the end, _Adam Parrish_.

Ronan's knuckles ached. He smiled, razor-bright.

 

 


End file.
